About

Dunlin Press is an independent publishing house based in the artistic community of Wivenhoe, Essex. Its focus is emerging writers and visual artists whose work is intelligent, thought-provoking and beautiful, and which for various reasons might prove difficult to place with more established or commercial publishers. Dunlin Press publishes works of fiction and non-fiction, poetry, photo-essays, illustration and more.

Lessons for an Apprentice Eel Catcher, Alex Toms. Published by Dunlin Press

Lessons for An Apprentice Eel Catcher is a debut collection from poet Alex Toms. Here Toms introduces us to a troupe of curious characters to explore themes of love, womanhood and sex. At the centre of this collection is the eel catcher, a shadowy figure who lives on the fringes of everyday experience. The eel catcher weaves willow traps, and tales of folklore and magic, evoking an East Anglia inhabited by poachers, witches and ghosts. In her poems, Toms skilfully summons the uncanny, and out of it draws a slithering sense with which we are all familiar. Here are all the snares of life, and also perhaps, a spell that could set us free.

The Orphaned Spaces, is an illustrated exploration of overlooked areas of natural beauty – edgelands, ex-industrial, derelict and brownfield sites, and the sometimes rare flora and fauna that is found there. More than a nature book, it is a rumination on life, loss and time, through the prism of liminal spaces captured in moments between dilapidation and regeneration. The book is the culmination of a multi-discipline collaboration by poet MW Bewick and artist Ella Johnston.

The Orphaned Spaces is also available as a limited edition, made-to-order box set.

Priced Out by Tinsel Edwards, photography Lady Ray

Priced Out, by Tinsel Edwards, is a personal and powerful look at the declining state of housing in the capital through the eyes of an artist. It traces the high rises in cost of rented accommodation, the spiralling property prices, and skewers the reasons why artists, who contribute – like so many others – so much to the character, wellbeing and uniqueness of London life, are being priced out of the city.

Scarecrow is the third release from Dunlin Press. This debut collection of poems from MW Bewick transfigures contemporary landscapes of the city and the countryside in an unsettling flux of fractured narrative time and atomised human agency. At turns wistful, angry, and touched with remorse, this inventive and thought-provoking volume brings together registers of folk, baroque and the surreal to confront a 21st-century sense of existential crisis.

Dunlin Press’ second book The Migrant Waders, a collection of illustration, evocative prose, poetry and reportage that follows the migration routes of wading and shore birds from the high arctic to the tropics.

Its first book is Est: Collected reports from East Anglia, a collection of fiction, non-fiction and psychogeography from Norfolk, Essex, Suffolk and Cambridgeshire.

About us

Dunlin Press is operating as a not-for-profit enterprise and was founded by Martin Bewick and Ella Johnston in 2014.

MW Bewick is widely published as a journalist and editor, and is a writer of poetry and prose. He is editor and occasional photographer at Dunlin Press. He studied at the University of Essex, where he also taught, and his doctorate focused on working-class literatures and the work of author James Kelman. As a writer his focus is on explorations of place, memory, incompleteness and polyphonic evocations of experience.

Ella Johnston has worked as an editor across numerous magazines and websites, and is a practicing artist. She is editor and designer at Dunlin Press. Her artistic practice reflects a long-standing interest in nature, especially birdlife and wild flowers and plants. Her abstract work aims to depict landscape and space as a palimpsest, as she paints, draws scrapes and washes layers of inks, metallic elements and water over paper. Ella trained in art and the history of art at Chelsea College of Art and the University of Essex.